Development of Airway Management training system WKA-4: Provide useful feedback of trainee performance to trainee during Airway Management

The emerging field of medical robotics is aimed at introducing intelligent tools. More recently, thanks to the innovations in robot technology (RT), advanced medical training systems have been introduced to improve the skills of trainees. The principal challenges of developing efficient medical training systems is that they must simulate real-world conditions of the task, provide objective assessments of training progress, and provide useful feedback to trainees. So far, many medical training systems have been developed; however, those training system do not fulfill the three conditions of the Active Training system. For the proof of concept of an effective Active Training system, we proposed WKA-4 (Waseda Kyotokagaku Airway No.4) which satisfies all of the requirements of the Active Training system. In this paper, we present the hardware configuration of the WKA-4 briefly, which has 11 embedded actuators and 44 embedded sensors, and simulates real-world condition of the task. In addition, in order to verify the usefulness of feedback of the WKA-4 for medical training, a set of the experiments were carried out to a doctor group and two novice groups. One novice group is provided by the feedback of the embedded sensors of the WKA-4 while the other novice group is not. From the comparisons of the results of the experiments, we verify the effectiveness of our proposed Active Training system.